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Hello, I'm Jack Wilson. Welcome to Episode 305 of The History of Literature.

Okay, here we go. Hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. It's February,

which is Valentine's Day Month. The month for Love and Loving and Lovers. We won't

have too much of that today, but next week is going to be all love all the time, starting

with a professor who writes about her love affair with the poetry of John Geetz. I think

you will enjoy that one today. We have something different. We're following up on Monday's

conversation with Chagosi Obioma, which was a fun one, and he got me thinking about the

remains of the day. That great novel. We've discussed Kezwo Ishiguro a couple of times

before here on The History of Literature. He's a favorite, for sure, in one of Mike's

all-time favorites as well, but he also takes risks. I think he appeared in our hatchet

jobs episode if I recall correctly. He's taken a few savage beatings from the critics.

But when he connects, he's glorious, and the remains of the day is one of those almost

universally beloved works. If readers complain, they say it's too slow, it's too quiet, not

what happens, they get bored. But for literature fans, I think that's part of the appeal, not

the slowness, but the hush. It's a book for people who think, who appreciate subtlety, who

find something intensely dramatic in an inner life full of ideas and rules and self-belief,

values, and then the cracking open of that system of beliefs. I'm not just talking about

epiphany, which I tend to think is overrated. Epiphany can fall into cliché now that

we've had a hundred years or so of it in literary fiction, but Ishiguro goes deep. He gets

at more than just the casual, and then I realize that some stories settle for. His query

or inquiry is different. What happens when we structure our world around one belief system,

...